Faith No More, The real Thing
Faith No MoreTHE REAL THING.
The album that contains "Epic" also marked a major personnel change for Faith No More, introducing Mike Patton on lead vocals while keeping the band's collision of metal, funk, keyboards and pop hooks intact.
Album artwork shown for commentary and historical reference. Image source: Cover Art Archive / MusicBrainz.
SEVEN THINGS
WORTH KNOWING.
Recording stories, personnel, physical details and numbers worth keeping with the record.
The Real Thing was released in 1989, and the standard CD sequence contains 11 tracks.
It was Faith No More's first studio album with Mike Patton as lead vocalist after the departure of Chuck Mosley.
Faith No More and Matt Wallace produced the album, with Wallace and Jim Vereecke credited as engineers on the core recordings.
The recording lineup was Mike Patton, Billy Gould, Mike Bordin, Roddy Bottum and Jim Martin.
"Epic" appears as track two and became one of three major singles associated with the album alongside "From Out of Nowhere" and "Falling to Pieces."
The album includes a cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" near the end of the sequence.
"Woodpecker From Mars" is an instrumental credited to Mike Bordin and Jim Martin as composers.
WHY THIS
ALBUM MATTERS.
The Real Thing is the point where Faith No More's strange combination of heavy guitar, funk rhythm, keyboards and theatrical vocals became a much larger commercial proposition without becoming conventional.
THE
NUMBERS.
TRACKS
The standard album contains eleven songs.
MEMBERS
Patton, Gould, Bordin, Bottum and Martin made the record.
CORE SINGLES
Epic, From Out of Nowhere and Falling to Pieces led the campaign.
THE
PHYSICAL OBJECT.
The cover's surreal, slightly decayed imagery gives the record a visual identity as difficult to categorize as the music, with the band name and title kept secondary to the central image.
RESEARCH SOURCES
Facts are checked against official artist archives, release databases, recording credits and established archival sources before publication.
KEEP
DIGGING.
More recording stories, strange credits, cover art, chart numbers and details hiding inside the records.